Attempting to periodize a career as stuffed with highlights as Steven Spielberg's is not an easy task. Unlike, say, a Welles or a Godard, we don't find the same kind of radical makeover every five to seven years prompted by a geographic shift, an ideological conversion, a new medium, or just plain economic necessity. Since the success of Jaws in 1975, Spielberg has essentially been on top of the American film industry, able to choose and control his own projects with extraordinary freedom and unlimited resources, his name alone -despite several famous flops- a guarantee of success for whatever financial backers he may remain in need of. Yet rather than confirming his status as a self-supporting artist, this lends the appearance of a certain homogeneity in his work to those unwilling or unable to see past Spielberg the institution (or corporation, as many would have it). Perhaps more like his own beloved John Ford, there is a more gradual progress toward maturity, sophistication, and melancholy concealed among Spielberg's various phases (and of all contemporary Hollywood directors, only Spielberg is prolific and speedy enough to be compared with Ford). Of course there are easy enough categories to be read chronologically: the early genre blockbusters (Jaws, Close Encounters), the Lucas-allianced Indiana Jones trilogy, the first attempts at literary credibility (Empire of the Sun, Color Purple), the belated adolescence (Always, Hook), the historical films (Schindler's List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan), and the recent "on the run" duo of Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. These periods tend to be punctuated by the outright failures, whether overblown duds like 1941 or merely anonymous franchise entries like The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Absent from the above groupings are the two films that, for me at least, stand resolutely alone and represent Spielberg at his most visually concentrated, most personal, most accessible, and most deeply felt (in other words, the sum of his greatest strengths): E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). These similar and awkwardly titled films also represent the opposite poles of Spielberg's popular reception. E.T. was the most beloved "family entertainment"of its day, the highest grossing film of all time, and a genuine phenomenon at probably the last moment in history in which it was possible to distinguish such a thing from just another saturation marketing campaign. A.I., on the other hand, was treated more like the Kubrick film it never got to be; with a few notable exceptions, it was scorned, misunderstood, and barely earned back its costs in the U.S., but then almost immediately began to be reevaluated and now seems destined to be deemed a classic in another five or ten years.

It's no secret that Spielberg has been obsessed with various notions of childhood, especially endangered childhood innocence, throughout his entire career. His first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express (1974), dealt with a woman breaking her husband out of prison to find their infant son, and nearly every film thereafter revisits this primal scenario in some variation from either the parent or child's perspective. (There is evidence in Spielberg’s biography to help explain this for those who are interested, but never mind, by now his filmography is so extensive as to become his biography.) Yet only E.T. and A.I., both ostensibly science-fiction films, focus on the state of childhood itself. The former deals with the mechanics of childhood, its way of looking, learning, moving, relating to the world, and is limited exclusively to the child’s point of view; the latter deals with the metaphysics of childhood, what it means to be born of another being, and is inflected with such deep, impossible longing and suffering that it could only have come from—and speak to—an adult sensibility.

Spielberg’s perpetual return to innocence in peril may also remind us of D.W. Griffith's similar obsession with idealized femininity under attack. Where Griffith's moral imagination was fully Victorian even if his cinematic aesthetic was completely modern, Spielberg seems frozen in certain older conceptions of the family as well, no matter how far he continues to push the limits of digitally-assisted cinema. I do not think that this makes him, as Robert Kolker and Robin Wood have argued quite unfairly, the fountainhead of conservatism in contemporary cinema. The comparison with Griffith is necessary, however, and productive in its associations. "Only D.W. Griffith,"writes Armond White, "has comparably commanded movie culture and the art form itself simultaneously. To deny this about Spielberg is to lie." White speaks with such force because many would deny it. But I would argue that Spielberg's deepest connection to Griffith lies in their shared inheritance from the true master of storytelling in the Western tradition: Charles Dickens.

It was Sergei Eistenstein, of all people, who first argued for Dickens's centrality within Griffith and thus to the movies. In the mid-Forties, he wrote about rediscovering the novelist in adulthood: "All of us read him in childhood, gulped him down greedily, without realizing that much of his irresistibility lay not only in his capture of detail in the childhoods of his heroes, but also in that spontaneous, childlike skill for storytelling, equally typical for Dickens and the American cinema, which so surely and delicately plays upon the infantile traits in its audience." It seems that this passage could just as easily be applied to Spielberg and his so-called children's films, though Eisenstein's "infantile traits" wouldn't carry the negative connotation we assume it would. Of course, Spielberg is most often criticized for this emotional manipulation as a sign of his irredeemable "Hollywood-ness," as if someone as antithetical to commercial cinema as Eisenstein himself didn't equally rely on predictable emotional responses from the audience to achieve his ends. What Griffith, Dickens, Spielberg, and even Eistenstein share is the instinctive ability to know when and how to direct the audience’s attention with pinpoint precision to salient details. Eisenstein insists that Dickens’s eye for detail was purely cinematic. In Griffith this most obviously took the form of "inventing" the expressive close-up of the human face. But we see the same idea at work in Spielberg’s countless details that avoid close-ups -as in A.I., when Monica learns over the phone that her biological son has been saved, the camera dollies in to show only her hand as it dramatically clutches the wall.

The affinities between Spielberg and Dickens grow the more we think about them. Both were unquestionably the most popular and successful artists of their age, with the inevitable backlash and resentment that comes with popularity-though it seems to have struck Spielberg earlier. Even though both were gifted with an often shameless talent for self-promotion, this popularity was nevertheless born of a natural, unsuppressible ability to connect with audiences again and again. Success, even wild success, can be a fluke, but a lifetime of wild success requires a divine touch. (Speaking of divine touches, in another context I might be inclined to argue that both artists are possessed of a deeply Christian sensibility.) Both are known for working extremely fast: Spielberg shot the unbelievably complex A.I. in under three months and Dickens wrote most of his novels "on the fly"in serial form. Most of all, though, it is their mutual sympathy for and understanding of children combined with their ability as storytellers that connects them today at either end of the 20th century.

This spiritual linkage is only literally realized in one instance of Spielberg’s work that I'm aware of—the copy of Oliver Twist with which Celie teaches herself to read in The Color Purple, a book that assumes an almost talismanic power in Celie's life. It cements the bond between her sister and herself, and Spielberg uses portions of the text to mark her progression from childhood to adulthood; a dissolve joins her quavering, hesitant reading of the novel to her later fluidity with the same.

“What amazed Orwell was Dickens's empathy with children; what amazes me is that children could ever read David Copperfield,” wrote David Gates in his introduction to that novel, speaking of its former popularity among grade-schoolers, and I would say the same thing today about kids and E.T. Seeing it again upon it's 20th-anniversary re-release for the first time since my own childhood, I was struck by just how rich and strange it is, in ways that make it accessible to youth if not necessarily comprehensible to them. It is often noted that for the first three quarters of the film Spielberg shows no adult (aside from the mother) from above the neck, as in a Peanuts episode. That may be a facile comparison, but E.T. is made to resemble that form that most dominates the consciousness of modern children, the cartoon, far more than it resembles anything like science fiction. Take, for example, E.T.'s constantly shifting abilities; at times barely able to walk, yet he’s able to instantly camouflage himself behind a wall of stuffed animals when his hiding place is threatened with discovery. Or the way he passes unnoticed right in front of the mother in the kitchen, her entire consciousness absorbed by momentarily peeking in the fridge. There is no internal logic or consistency to this world, nor is it missed-the freedom of childhood imagination is the only rule. The film speaks to children in their language, but it takes an adult viewer to realize that this is a language at all. This is Spielberg's sophistication and appeal across the divide of age. Elliott’s symbiotic emotional bond with E.T. -an everyday experience for children but a complicated idea for adults- is never expressed in words that a child could understand, or any words at all for that matter. It is presented purely in cinematic terms, crosscutting between their rhyming behavior and forcing us to provide the explanation. When was the last time a children’s movie made in Hollywood attempted anything so bold?

E.T. may become more abstract and cartoonish with each successive viewing, but A.I. only seems purer and more profound. Twenty years after E.T., the film’s ontological approach to childhood seems appropriate from a filmmaker now in middle age. Through the robot-boy David, Spielberg asks certain basic haunting questions about the precarious nature of childhood even at its most seemingly indestructible: if an immortal, healthy, devoted child being raised in a comfortable existence with all needs indefinitely fulfilled cannot be safe and happy, then what hope is there for the rest of us? David's spontaneous realization of mortality at his mother's illuminated dressing table feels darker than anything Spielberg has ever filmed. "Mommy, will you die?" he asks. And it feels like the thought had never occurred to anyone before. From this moment on, and for the next 2,000 years, David's life spins out of control, as he attempts fulfill impossible desires and reconcile impossible realities—in other words, he becomes an adult. "At its deepest, one can feel adulthood asking childhood for forgiveness," writes Armond White. For all the film’s concern with fairy tales and storybooks, it's fundamentally an adult vision. It speaks neither to children nor through them but about how our adult lives are constantly informed by childhood, whether we admit it or not. These issues have often been raised on film, but nowhere have they been treated with greater wonder, compassion, and fear.

David tries to end his life by drowning himself in a ruined Manhattan. Reviewing this scene again I am reminded of a passage from David Copperfield in which the adult narrator reflects back on the near-drowning of a child and the adult pain it might have spared: "There has been a time since when I have wondered whether, if the life before her could have been revealed to me at a glance, and so revealed as that a child could fully comprehend it'would it have been better for little Em'ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning- Yes, it would have been." In this conjunction of childhood possibility and the adult certainty of pain, we find the roots of Spielberg. ++